Cryptocurrency airdrops: maximise revenue – The Cryptonomist

Exploiting cryptocurrency airdrops is not easy: there are many points to consider if you want to maximise your income from this activity.

In this article, we will try to simplify it by giving you 3 tips that you must follow.

Let’s see what they are

First tip to maximise cryptocurrency airdrop revenue: use multiple wallets

Whenever a plan to release an airdrop to the community is announced in a project’s roadmap, many users rush to perform on-chain transactions in order to be eligible and earn cryptocurrency for free.

Unfortunately, competition is fierce and the criteria that the project team uses to distribute the airdrop is never known, so it is necessary to go ‘blind’. This does not mean that you have to perform actions randomly, but rather that the winning strategy is to try them all and perform as many operations as possible: token swaps, providing liquidity, buying NFTs, using bridges, etc.

All of this may be enough to qualify for an airdrop, but there is one way to maximise the result of such activity and that is to use multiple wallets.

For example, if you were able to get $1000 from an airdrop with one wallet, imagine what it would mean to repeat the exact same actions on 10 different wallets. The real profit is made by multiplying the potential income from airdrops, not by hoping that a single address will qualify.

By using multiple wallets you can also choose to cover multiple areas of expertise in the sense of focusing on different areas at the same time, e.g. using one address only to provide liquidity to DEX, another to interact exclusively with smart contracts and yet another to buy/sell NFTs.

Obviously, the best thing to do is to perform as many actions as you consider optimal on each of the wallets we have available.

Be careful, however, as this activity, described as a “sybil attack”, is FORBIDDEN by projects that release airdrops, and if discovered you may be banned.

To avoid detection, it is advisable not to ‘recycle’ the same funds across multiple accounts, but to use different funds for each address. It is even better if each address is ‘funded’ from a different wallet, rather than from the same wallet, be it an exchange or a private wallet.

Patience is the most important weapon for success in crypto airdrops.

The second tip concerns one of the attitudes we often apply in real life, namely patience.

Unfortunately, from the moment a crypto project team announces a possible airdrop to the moment the tokens are released to the community, up to 2 years can pass, although the average time is usually 12-18 months.

In this timeframe, it is not enough to do the ‘little job’ and use the services of the project once and then wait for the airdrop.

Many of the DAOs that have airdropped to their community, such as Optimism and Arbitrum, have put a lot of emphasis on the concept of ‘repeat users’, i.e. repeating operations and interactions with layer 2 smart contracts.

Therefore, one needs to be patient and not lose focus by repeating operations on several different occasions.

It may be wise to plan a task on the agenda to remind oneself that, from time to time, there are transactions to be carried out on a blockchain or on a particular protocol.

As an indication, it is good to perform at least 5 transactions per month between swaps, bridges and liquidity provision. You can also perform all actions in one day, but the important thing is that the same procedure is repeated in different months, again at least 3-4 times.

Conceptually, if you interact with dApps on the blockchain occasionally (even if you perform a few actions, but consistently) for a whole year, the chances of getting an airdrop increase dramatically.

On the other hand, if you perform 200 actions in a single afternoon and then abandon the whole thing, it will be very difficult to be rewarded with cryptocurrency as a gift.

Don’t waste money on commissions

The final piece of advice, and the most important for those with little capital to put into airdrop hunting, is to save on commission fees for the transactions that take place.

Unfortunately, these vary depending on which blockchain you’re on and other factors such as the day of the week and the cost of gas on L1s.

In order to avoid wasting money on gas fees, it is important to choose to participate in airdrops where the fees are not too high, or even better, to only execute transactions on testnets.

Testnets are test networks that are used to find bugs or generally make improvements to the main network while waiting for the mainnet  network to be launched. 

On these testnets, test tokens can be used in “demo accounts”: these tokens take the value of the corresponding cryptocurrency running on real blockchains and can be requested via some faucet.

For example, you can request ETH (demo) tokens on the “Ethereum goerli testnet” via this faucet.

From the Goerli network, you can move the demo ETH tokens to other testnets we are more interested in for the purpose of earning an airdrop, or simply by using a faucet, if available, directly from that testnet.

Keep in mind that when a blockchain makes its market debut, the testnet is usually the first to launch, so you can get ahead of users who only use the mainnet.

If you don’t want to waste time on testnets, which are statistically less profitable than mainnet activity, and at the same time save on fees, it may be wise to monitor the price of gas on a daily basis so that you can trade when it is cheapest.

There are several useful tools to monitor the Ethereum gas price (if you are using layer2 or the Ethereum network itself). 

You can also choose the most convenient time during the day, as transaction fees can vary even within a few hours.

As an indication, it is good to take advantage of occasions when gas costs less than 40 gwei and avoid situations where it costs more than 50 gwei.